Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream

Coffee ice cream has been and always will be my favorite.  This Vietnamese coffee ice cream, made with sweetened condensed milk and very strongly brewed coffee, is extra special. 

I used David Lebovitz's eggless and super easy recipe from The Perfect Scoop.  I used some Trung Nguyen coffee that Tim brought back from Vietnam.  So good.

Vietnamese Pomelo Salad

Tim and I have been craving some of the awesome dishes we had while traveling around Vietnam... we decided we would give one of their super fresh, spicy, salty, sweet and crunchy salads a go.  I found local (well, local-ish; from Aceh) pomelos at the grocery store and thus pomelo salad it was.  

Pomelos are massive; I think the one I bought was about 2 lbs.  They have a super thick rind and pith, over an inch in most places.  The flesh is pretty great, too... like a mild grapefruit (not as puckeringly tart), and although quite juicy, the little sacs don't break when you pull it apart, so, as you can see from my photo, the juice doesn't get all over everything.

Strangely the cookbook we bought from Morning Glory restaurant in Hoi An didn't have a pomelo salad recipe, but the internet was full of options.  I decided to go with this one from Appetite for China, supplemented with some sauteed shrimp, briefly marinated in fish sauce per Steamy Kitchen's directions.

An awesome dish, perfect for a hot summer night (or any night here, as they are all hot).  Crunchy from the carrots and roasted peanuts, salty from the fish sauce, spicy from the chili, sweet/tart from the pomelo and fragrant from the mint.

Banh Mi: Vietnamese Pork Meatball Subs

I saw this pork meatball banh mi recipe in Bon Appetit's January issue and knew I had to make it... banh mi are (is?) basically Vietnamese grinders/hoagies/subs/what have you.

Conveniently, the CSA had the carrots and daikon radishes (which look eerily like my nemesis, the parsnip) that make up the slaw that the recipe uses to compliment the meatballs. Also, it calls for plenty of everybody's favorite spicy sauce, Sriracha.

If you dig on swine, I highly recommend you give this recipe a try... the recipe really made only enough meatballs for 4 sandwiches, but it made a ton of the carrot/daikon slaw, more than necessary.

Summer Rolls with Spicy Peanut Sauce

Another Steamy Kitchen recipe... this time a Vietnamese summer rolls with a spicy peanut dipping sauce. I always wanted to try my hand at making these, and this week I had mint, a cucumber, and Bibb lettuce from my CSA. I had the rice noodles and rice wrappers from a trip to Eden Center with Jennifer many months ago.

These were delicious. I added some basil in there, and used lemon zest in place of lemongrass for marinating the shrimp, as Jaden recommends. I omitted the mango because the ones I saw in the store weren't really ripe yet. I considered adding nectarine or peach instead for a little bit of a sweet factor, but the peach just turned into a pile of mush when I tried to make it into matchsticks with the mandoline. We didn't miss it, though.

Warning: these things are very hard to wrap! Mine were pretty messy looking. My lack of skills may have been due to the 3 margaritas and hookah full of cinnamon tobacco I had on Amy's roof just prior to making these, though.